Chinese-born actress Joan Chen broke both race and gender barriers when she directed the May-November romance, Autumn in New York. Released in 2000, the well received film starred Richard Gere and Winona Ryder. Chen mentions taking strength from her female support team

AWFJ’s December’s SPOTLIGHT is on Angelina Jolie, humanitarian, activist, mother, actress and filmmaker whose two 2107 films brilliantly illuminate social issues impacting women. Both of the films were selected as AWFJ Movie of the Week.

Now in its 12th year, the Belize International Film Festival has enjoyed growing success with every year, thanks to its founder and festival director Suzette Zayden. A Belizean native, her original goal with BIFF was to put Belize on the film map but also to engender connectivity between her fellow countrymen through film.

Told from the viewpoint of nine female filmmakers, Waru is the first feature film from New Zealand to be made by Maori women since Mereta Mita’s Mauri almost 30 years ago. Eight female Maori directors each contributed a ten minute vignette, presented as a continuous shot in real time, that unfolds around the tangi (funeral) of a small boy (Waru) who died at the hands of his caregiver.

“I have a huge palette which I intend to use, and I want to be another female director who demonstrate that’s not the case,” says this protege of visionary film-maker Terrence Malick. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, one could argue that American Fable was the film Hamilton was destined to make, letting her imagination run wild as she toiled in corn fields, conjuring up scenes reminiscent of M Night Shyamalan’s Signs, at the same time observing firsthand the shadow cast by Big Agriculture as families lost their farms and livelihoods. Read on…

In the 2017, Universal is once again doing their darnedest to forge their old and much-loved monster properties into a unified and hopefully lucrative shared-world franchise. The Mummy is not necessarily the first such creature to come to mind, and first-time director Alex Kurtzman is not necessarily the first filmmaker, but the screenwriter-turned director tells us why he – and it – are the best possible choice.

Rufus Sewell, 49, has received some of the best reviews of his career for his role as Obergruppenführer John Smith in Amazon Prime’s The Man in The High Castle. Loosely based on a Philip K Dick novel, it poses an alternative history of North America if the Nazis had won the Second World War. It’s little surprise that the Donald Trump campaign was one of the main advertisers on the show, about which he says, “I don’t think that’s an accident.”

Emily Blunt gasped in horror when she first saw her transformation into a blotchy-faced alcoholic trainwreck, the unlikely heroine of The Girl on the Train. “It was hard seeing myself look so awful. I came into work with no make-up and they would make me look even worse, adding rosacea and bags. I could barely look at my own reflection.”

Gill Pringle began her career as a news reporter on Britain’s famed Fleet Street, planning on changing the world, exposing injustice and covering war zones. Instead she became the editor of The Sun’s legendary Bizarre column and, later, The Mirror’s White Hot Club, travelling the world with Michael Jackson, U2 and Madonna. A growing passion for film prompted a move to Los Angeles 20 years ago where she interviews actors and filmmakers for leading broadsheet and magazine titles in the UK and Australia. Gill’s outlets include The Independent, the i, Sunday Times, Woman, S Express Magazine, Saga, and The Herald in the UK, and Filmink, Stack, The West Australian, news.com.au, Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, Stellar, Total Girl, K-Zone, Primolife and Yours in Australia.